The Strangest Things
by Chrystler
Summary: "Lately she's been thinking the strangest things..."
1. Part 1

Title: The Strangest Things  
Author: Chrystler  
Disclaimer: The following characters are the property of Joss Whedon, David Greenwalt, Mutant Enemy Productions, 20th Century Fox, etc., etc. They are used without permission, intent of infringement or expectation of profit.   
Summary: "Lately she's been thinking the strangest things..."  
Rating: PG-13  
Spoilers: Angel S3 up to and including "Birthday". Pretend "Provider" never happened (whaddya mean, you're way ahead of me?), pretend this did instead. There, that's your timeline…  
Spelling: Is British. Because I am. :-P  
Author's Notes: See end of fic.  
Distribution: If anyone wants it, please ask.   
Feedback: Please send to chrystler_wolf@yahoo.co.uk 

* * *

_The Strangest Things – Part 1_

Lately she's been thinking the strangest things.

It's not easy manoeuvring a bulky vintage Plymouth into the only free - rather tight - parking space left outside the stores at 1 pm on a sunny afternoon. Pissing off a vampire by denting his precious paintwork isn't the best way to start your week, but that's not what she's thinking. She's thinking the strangest thing. She's thinking about getting old. 

In Hollywood if you have the money and the right specialist you don't have to age. She climbs out of the driver's seat and slams the convertible's door closed. Her hand lingers a while on the chrome finish with a mixture of pride and affection. If they have a similar level of attention lavished upon them, cars can be as pristine and shiny as the day they rolled off the production line. Their vampire owners don't visibly age either, not for a good millennium or two anyway. 

She dodges past a few people on the sidewalk and ducks inside an open doorway. Most humans - humans on the kind of pay checks Cordelia draws - they get old. In your thirties the furrows begin to set in, and the lines are etched a little deeper with each passing decade, until you're not sure where the wrinkles end and the face begins. Or you die, of course. She wasn't looking forward to either outcome, but now that she's not so sure about a lot of things, she's not so sure about this either.

Her wrist swings her string bag a little as she peruses the aisles of the grocery store. Idly, her hand lights on a juicy, plump, ruby red grapefruit. Equally idly, she wonders if will taste the way she remembers it tasting. Everything else does, she surmises, so why would grapefruit be different? All the same, you don't know until you try. She pops it into her bag. Lately she's been trying a new experiment every day. Just little things. Like a different food, or staying in the shade to see if her tan will still fade, or seeing how many stairs to her apartment she can jump in a bound. So far her results have been both relieving and disappointing. Ultimately, they have been inconclusive. Cordelia finds it frustrating. Frustrating, that she keeps on thinking the strangest things and not drawing a single conclusion.

A few more items are slipped into the bag. The basics like bread and milk. Rich coffee grounds for Angel, Gunn and herself, the imported loose tea Wesley insists upon and a litre of fizzy sugary Mountain Dew for Fred, not forgetting formula and diapers for the little guy. She tucks the latter under her free arm. Sometimes when she's doing the family shop like this, she feels like the Momma bear, the nurturing alpha female, the homemaker, the matriarch. It's so very strange, she muses, that the roles you fall into are rarely the ones you expect.

A red-cheeked toddler rolls like a drunkard round the corner shrieking and laughing with his mother in hot pursuit. Giddy with stolen freedom the small fugitive is proving difficult to ensnare. His mother is flushed herself but with harassment rather than amusement. She pauses briefly to hitch a second infant further up her hip before resuming the chase. Cordelia drops her purchases to the floor and lunges for the escapee, entrapping him gently in her arms. He squirms a little, but giggles into her face as she lowers herself to his level and asks his name. He replies only with a final wriggle before his parent catches up and takes a firm hold of his hand. The mother breathlessly utters her thanks and drags off the now-forever-nameless boy towards the checkout. Cordelia straightens, retrieves her shopping and thinks it's strange that the encounter doesn't make her think of Connor in a few years, but of Doyle - then, Darla.

Since she made her choice she's been feeling an intimacy with the dead Irish man that she never experienced when he was here - alive, whiskey-scented, and gabbling lilting compliments and amusing worldly anecdotes alternately into her ear. She understands him a little better now. Understands why he needed the scotch and the dogs. Why he always preferred the 'run and hide' to the 'stand and fight'. Why it was easier for him to fail at being a human than succeed at being part-demon. She understands now what it's like to look in the mirror and have no idea what it is you see there. Perhaps vampires have it easy, she thinks, to see nothing at all.

She gets now why a man who only wanted to marry his sweetheart and teach third grade would always be haunted by the smooth peaches-and-cream faces of the children he would now never have and the blue spikes of the ones that, to his horror, he just might. Gets now how some ghosts are easier to deal with if you're lost in a blue mist too. Just one more shot, before the silhouettes in your mind blur with the silhouettes in the bar, and your half-life melts into the intangible haze of the half-lives of those with whom you choose to drink.

She doesn't think she'll go that route, but then, she never thought she was the kind of girl who harboured strong maternal feelings until a few days ago: She had been washing Connor's bootees in the basement and found herself leaning against the washer, clutching at her empty belly as rivulets of saltwater coursed down her face, desperately hoping the noise of the machine would drown out her craven sobs, and had grieved until the gulps of thick soapy air choked her throat.

Since then she has reminded herself that Darla was a demon mother and Connor her perfect human child. Reminds herself that sometimes miracles really do happen. Tries to forget she's already the recipient of one such intervention by the deities, without which she wouldn't be walking around a store right now thinking the strangest things. Holds on to the knowledge that Darla had bestowed upon her more than one miracle too and she was so much less deserving than Cordelia, wasn't she? That's all she permits herself to think about Darla just now. Some of the things she thinks lately are stranger than others.

Stings. At first it stings. It stings and you fight. Then there's red. Bright. So bright and thick and velvet. It flows; the smarting fades. Panic suffocates in the throat. Breathe. Breath. No longer necessary. Let it be. Bleed. Surrender. After all, what else have you ever wanted?

She reaches the non-food section, and proceeds to systematically fill her bag with the essential items that are always needed at the Hyperion. Batteries for tazers, pens for Wesley's desk (she swears he eats them), the funny shaped light bulbs that you can't get anywhere else in town but are the only ones that fit in the upstairs wall-fittings (secretly, Cordelia suspects that's because some of the stock in here may be as old as the hotel itself), mousse _and_ gel for the man without the reflection (he's the vainest dead guy she knows, she considers smartly, then recalls that it could be worse and wonders how many times a month Spike has to touch up the peroxide). She picks out a new shampoo for herself (coconut and papaya – one more experiment), and decides to get a second bottle in case Angel does what he has done the last two times she's changed her brand and, after lingering around the back of her head for an afternoon as she works at her desk taking conspicuous sniffs, asks to borrow some. A voice memory comes back to her with surprising clarity and plasters a stupid smile on her face, right there in amongst the bath and shower products.

"Nobody's asking you to go, Cordy. If the vampires need grooming tips, we'll give you a call," says Xander dryly, into her ear. 

Xander. If only Xander Harris, of Scooby Gang and ex-boyfriend fame could see her now (if 'boyfriend' was the correct term to describe his role in the disaster that was the relationship/hollow sham/whatever that they briefly shared all those eons ago). She guesses he wouldn't believe his eyes. Well, maybe his eyes, but certainly not his ears if he were told all that had happened in the last three years. Sure, he'd believe all the big demony fights, the dark magic resurrections, and the hell dimensions – he's a graduate of the Hellmouth Program of Education after all. Angel going off the rails - that he would _definitely_ have no trouble swallowing. In fact, a dance of 'I told you so' and the word 'nyah' might be used. But her? Would he believe the changes in her? Cordelia is almost smug as she bets he wouldn't. All those years of high school and still the agents told her she couldn't act.

She's been thinking about Xander a lot lately, one more of the strange things she seems unable to get off her mind. Strange because she can't remember the last time she thought of him and it was more than a fleeting remembrance connected with some more vivid and vital piece of her Sunnydale history. Usually it's an odd snapshot, long believed lost in her conscious, of an encounter with Angel - both the souled and unsouled varieties. Her high school days seem a world away now. So does the shadowy figure, never there but always there, who was a past incarnation of the vampire/man/monster/must-never-forget, who somehow against all odds, and with the very heaviest kind of irony that seems to be a special favourite of the Powers, became the sun around which her life, her self, revolves. Yet lately, she has thought less about Sunnydale Angel and more about Sunnydale Xander; about the only real human love affair she ever had. 

The only one she will ever have.

She remembers a thought. She distinctly recalls sitting in front of her large flawless mirror, in her large flawless room, in her large flawless house, and thinking in muted surprise, 'I love Xander'. A tiny, fleeting realization that stilled the air for an instant before she continued brushing out her long flawless hair. She remembers the thought, the moment, but somehow she can't summon up the feeling that prompted it. She thinks it is strange how she can't remember how it felt to believe you were in love. Not in that way. Not in the normal, boy-meets-girl, boy-dates-girl, boy-breaks-girl's-heart way. Strange, perhaps, but also a relief. Because she knows about love now. Knows that Xander never loved her, because she has learned what it is to be loved and has discovered it's not accompanied by the awful nagging knowledge that the supposedly-loving party is constantly looking over their shoulder in desperate panic in case they are missing something better. Some_one_ better. 

She knows now how it feels to be loved. She knows, and therefore is glad she can't remember loving Xander. Can't remember how hopeless and hollow her human heart was. Loving Xander Harris happened to another girl from another time. She carries the memories, but only as if she had been a dispassionate observer not a protagonist. Strange, she thinks, but hasn't life in L.A. taught her that 'strange' doesn't necessarily have to preclude 'good'? 

Working for an unstable vampire to battle the forces of evil is strange but that's turned out better than she ever imagined. She smiles absently to herself and the shop clerk handling her transaction gives her the same 'are you on drugs?' look of withering disgust that the girl in Cordelia's memories used to give to the man she thought she loved on a frequent basis all those ages ago. She tries to suppress a giggle with only partial success. The girl ringing up her purchases shakes her head to herself, clearly considering this particular customer to be a couple of degrees more touched in the head than most. Cordelia swings her bag of shopping onto her shoulder, pockets her credit card and replies to the girl's aggrieved scowl with a dazzling smile. She's not about to be niggled by the attitude of a dissatisfied shop clerk, she sees a bigger picture these days and knows her part in it. But that doesn't stop her thinking… thinking… strange…

He comes to her, wearing the night. Eyes flecked gold (theirs?). Fingers (hers?) lock tightly into hair. Guiding. Begging. Sharp (his?), they slide. As if through butter. They slide. Slide. Slide. And she slips…

The balmy California sun floods her pupils and bathes her cheeks with its pervasive glow. She pauses on the sidewalk, juggling the load in her arms as she strives to retrieve the keys from her purse. With them finally located she moves towards the Plymouth, dumps her purchases on the back seat and opens the driver's door. The black paint is hot to the touch, absorbed rays radiate through her palm. Pausing briefly to slip on a pair of (replica) Gucci shades, she sinks into the seat. The dark upholstery scolds the backs of her legs. She gives a small yelp, drawing the momentary attention of passers by. Strange, that all they see is a beautiful girl in a beautiful car. Strange, that once it was all she wanted the world to see.

She'll take the groceries to the hotel, but she has to stop off at her apartment first. To jump the steps; sample the grapefruit; wash her hair.

~*~*~*~

Her shoulder bumps the heavy lobby door open, wide enough for her body and the groceries she's carrying to slip through. Her hair is tropically fragrant and still slightly damp, the sweet sharp taste of citrus fruit lingers in the crevices of her mouth, and she bears a small fresh bruise on her right knee. She has discovered that whatever kind of creature she is now it's no nearer to being able to leap six steps at once than her old human self was. She had sat on the flight of stairs, nursed her injury with fingertips and spit, and laughed at herself. Some of things she's been thinking are more plain silly than they are strange.

Wesley looks up at her distractedly from his office as she dumps the heavy bag and diapers on the reception desk. He is poured over a dusty text as usual, looking closer to the age of the manuscript than to his own years. She shoots him a smile. 

"Beautiful day, Wes. You should get out for a bit. You could do with some sun. I don't think 'milk bottle' is _the_ in look this season," she jests familiarly. 

They have the same conversation every day. It's become a soothing habit. She nags him to get out; he merely smiles his small serious smile and promises maybe tomorrow when he's finished translating this or researching that. She takes comfort in the timeless exchange. It reminds her the earth beneath her feet is still turning.

Shouts carry through the lobby from the garden where Gunn and Fred are playing with a very sun-blocked Connor. Amused, knowing instinctively at whose insistence the babe is so vigorously protected from the UV rays, Cordelia observes them for a while. A big, bulky, intimidating bad-ass from the very worst part of town cradling a tiny form with spun sugar delicacy, while a pretty, bright, a-little-less-retiring-every-day girl teases them both with affectionate laughter. The sight flushes her insides with warmth. And makes her ache in the pit of her stomach.

She turns back to the pale Englishman, "Where's Daddy Deadest? Catching some zees?"

Wes nods in confirmation, chewing absently on the end of his pen. So he _does_ eat them, she thinks triumphantly. She rummages in the bag, throws the batch of newly-bought replacement pens onto the desk under his nose - where they land with a smack - ignores his irate exclamation of 'Cordelia!', and offhandedly informs the room in general that she'll be upstairs replacing light bulbs on the second floor corridor if anyone wants her.

~*~*~*~

It is dark and secluded on the second floor. The voices which carry on the air from below are absorbed by the once rich wall-coverings and the faded carpeted splendour underfoot. The Hyperion drapes its old velveteen and mahogany musk around her frame like a shawl. She moves along the passage in hushed reverence, attending to each light fitting as she goes, letting the silence and dimness caress out the tensions in her shoulders and neck, and smooth away the last vestiges of pain in her damaged knee. 

The light above the elevator doors is too high for her to reach. She steals a chair from one of the half-furnished rooms and balances herself carefully, determined not to provide her solitary bruise with siblings. It's still a little too far from her reach. She stretches further cautiously.

"Need a hand with that?"

The bulb is taken from her fingers as another arm steadies her around her waist.

"Thanks," she replies as she leans back into the chest behind her companionably. He completes the chore with ease and lifts her down from her perch with something like a trace of old-fashioned gallantry. 

They remain for a moment, slim back to broad chest, in the comfortable peaceful stillness of the dusky corridor. The fleeting golden intimacy, stolen and nectar-sweet, of warriors at rest.

"Give it up, Cordy. You're never going to get between those two. Believe me, I know." Xander again. You knew nothing, Xander, she realises. God, none of us knew a thing.

"Had a good morning?" his voice is low and soft in the gloom. She shifts from him a little distance and turns to face him, resting her weight against the wall behind her.

"Shopping? You betcha," she covers easily.

"Is my…?" he begins.

"Car still in one piece? Yeah." 

She affects a pout. He merely grins into the half-light. Face a chiaroscuro. Sparking a thousand non-memories flashing through her brain. A scattered cinematic projection of shapes and shadows.

Scarlet and black. Delicious dark secrets whispered into welcoming veins. Elemental truths - always known; never spoken. She grasps desperately. Grazes. And finally gives beneath him. Drunk and drunken.

She picks up the box of bulbs and proceeds further down the hall to the next fitting. He follows instinctively at her heels like a dog. When she pushes the bulbs into his hands he holds them for her until she has exchanged yet another burnt out filament for a brand new one, then pads after her to the next; all the while hovering at her shoulder, taking the breaths he thinks she doesn't notice.

"Bulb."

"What?" 

He has that abstract look on his face. The one he seems to be wearing a lot lately, where his eyes slip to half-mast and he looks as if he's basking in… something.

"Hand me a bulb. This one's shot."

"Oh. Right." 

He complies. She turns to reach to the light. He draws another unnecessary intake of air. Her arms drop and, hesitant, she asks slowly, "What do I smell of to you?"

Busted. He answers simply, "Hot streets, and coconut… and something else."

"Papaya."

"That's it. New shampoo?" 

She nods, reaches up once more and screws the bulb into its fitting before turning to face him, "Nothing else?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know. I thought that maybe I might smell somehow… different… than I used to. That's all. I'm being stupid, I know," she laughs, "It's just… I keep thinking the weirdest things lately…" 

Then she catches the clouding in his eyes and trails off. She has an answer at last. And suddenly - strangely - she's not laughing anymore.

~*~*~*~

Business can be as slow as it likes, and somehow the filing never ends and the bills keep demanding to be settled. She moves behind the reception desk sifting paperwork and sipping freshly brewed coffee. Wes has abandoned his eyrie at last, but only to join Gunn in a pissing contest in the middle of lobby, masked ostensibly as an anti-vamp attack training session for Fred. Cordelia catches their woefully transparent exploits from the corner of her eye as she works and shrugs a little in bemused helplessness.

Their demonstrations of parries, punches and spinning kicks get more and more ambitious in their attempts to outdo the other, while Fred gasps politely at the right moments and giggles as she is cajoled into trying moves herself. Cordelia pauses, leaning over the desk counter, and takes in the show.

"The trick is Fred…" begins Wesley, in his best schoolmasterly tone.

"The trick is… never let 'em get in teeth-sinking range of any of your major arteries and you'll probably be okay," finishes Gunn economically.

Instinctively, Cordelia's hand goes to her neck to feel for the scars she knows have now faded to nothing.

"Well, there's a little more to the art of self-defence than that," Wes counters dryly.

Gunn turns to Cordelia for back up. "Hey girl, you've been battling with the blood-suckers as long as I have – am I right, or am I right?"

Before Cordelia can answer, Fred chimes in, "But Cordy doesn't have to worry about that anymore." She turns to Wesley for confirmation, "I mean, vampires don't drink demon blood, right?" 

Wesley affirms soberly, "Yes, vampires are unable to feed on demon blood. Only humans are at risk from being drained."

Fred quips ruefully, "Part-demons have all the luck."

An incomprehensible surge of rage rises for just a second somewhere deep inside her and Cordelia visualises backhanding Fred's delicate wholly human face across the room. 

She smiles tightly, "Of course they could still snap my neck like a twig, but – 'yay me'." 

Gathering her papers, she returns to the filing.

~*~*~*~


	2. Part 2

_The Strangest Things – Part 2_

~*~*~*~*~*~

The clock in the kitchen tells her it's two a.m. An early night in the lives of Angel Investigations, she notes dryly to Dennis as she drips post-shower water on the tiles and into her cocoa. She stirs the hot milky liquid and wonders if tonight's brew will be strong enough to banish the strangest of her thoughts. She pushes any ambivalent sentiments about her desire for that end aside and propels herself through the empty gesture. The thoughts will come whether welcomed or otherwise, but making the cocoa, weaving a warm dairy warding spell, connects her to the thread of sanity she feels is more attenuated than usual lately. 

She ambles lethargically into her bedroom. One hand wraps around her hot mug, the other rubs out the kinks in her tired neck muscles. She decides, as she places her drink on the nightstand, that her earlier musings on the theme of ageing were redundant. Her bones and brains already feel old. Since not long after first inheriting the visions Cordelia became aware of a weighty feeling, a constant pressure, upon her shoulders and neck. Over time the sensation incrementally increased as the toll of the vision aftermaths worsened. She noticed her posture become more slumped as she bent over her desk and that even little things, like walking up the stairs to Angels' room, took more energy than normal for a twenty year-old.

The visits to the neurologist had brought a new dimension to her intangible burden. Without ever allowing herself to form the phrase in her mind she had known implicitly that she was dying. The leaden yet invisible pressing on her spine now had a shadowy scythe to keep it company. Then the PTB had offered her a bye – a get-out-of-jail-free card - and she had taken it. For the good of the helpless. For Angel. For the alleviation of the crawling, squirming fear clutching at her lungs and gut. For all of the above, perhaps. It hardly matters now; it is done. It is done, and the load that balanced so oppressively on her shoulders has dispersed. Its onerousness no longer centres on hunching her vertebrae and pushing down the carriage of her head. Instead, the heaviness has diffused. Little tinges have sunk into every muscle in her body, pressing on her eyelids, dragging at her ankles. Spread out, the weight is less noticeable and easier to bear: Its greatest legacy so far being the lingering sensibility that her cartilage and synapses bear the brunt of decades far beyond her actual years. 

She wonders whether this is how it feels for Angel, how it feels to be old and yet still so young. She lowers her fatigued body onto the bed. It occurs to her that she never closed the curtains and then remembers that she never gets around to opening them these days. Lately, she finds a kind of solace in dimly lit rooms; in the dusky upper floors of the Hyperion, in the closeted privacy of her own draped and cloistered apartment. When she does venture out into the bright natural light of day, like to the store the previous afternoon, she always takes sunglasses. The glare of the sun impinges on her eyes more than before. She puts it down to her disturbed sleep - to the dreams. Her resulting weariness goes a long way to explaining her present state of mind. Sleep deprivation can do the strangest things. She settles the lower part of her body under the covers, sips her hot chocolate and wills Morpheus to come quickly tonight. Her faith in his power has been dented much of late so she draws her second line of defence from the nightstand and on to her knees. 

The book is old and worn around the spine and corners - a little like herself. Before it was Cordelia's it was her mother's, and before that it had belonged to her grandmother. The pages are yellow and faded but the tales it tells are as vivid to Cordelia now as they must have been to her maternal ancestors in their youth. When she was small, and one of the nannies in the long procession of hired help had first read these stories to her, she had been afraid. She had screamed sometimes and often cried herself to restless sleep in fear at the worlds they depicted. Worlds inhabited by trolls and ogres, witches and wolves, goblins and demons. Illustrations of eerie landscapes populated with twisted barely-human faces. The strangest of things. These tales hold no fear for her now. Not now she knows they are closer to the truth than anything else she remembers being spoon-fed in childhood. She has seen more otherworldly creatures than these covers contain. She has fought them. She has lived amongst them. She has become one of them. There is no fear to be found now in the grotesque fables, they are merely a distraction designed to exhaust her mind and propel her towards a slumber as peaceful as it is deep.

She reaches the end of a tale, pushes the book to the end of the bed, takes a final swig of cocoa, and, after first setting the mug back upon the bedside table, inches herself under the bed covers. Her pillow traps the scent of her hair and refracts it back at her. She breathes herself in, searching for the hint that isn't papaya or coconut. She senses nothing. She sleepily concludes that whatever kind of demon genes she has they are of the distinctly useless kind. Even Doyle had accentuated senses – when they weren't marred by a double scotch too many. She remembers that to her paltry human nose he had often smelt weird, but she can't decide if that was due to the demon in him or the ancient beer-and-bar-stained leather coat on him. She yawns her lack of a definitive answer, and snuggles deeper into the sheets.

~*~*~*~

The dregs of liquid left at the bottom of the mug on the nightstand vibrate imperceptibly from the impact as the hefty old book slides from the bed and hits the floor with a dull thud. Cordelia tosses a little in her sleep, stretching and burrowing into her linen unconsciously. 

"You should get out, Wes, it's an another beautiful day in LA," she trills airily, dumping her purse behind the desk and striking a pose against the doorjamb of the office. 

Her friend glances up at her, smiling softly; the dark wire of his glasses stark against the pale of his face. "I'll go for a walk to the bookstore later. There are a few cross-referencing materials I need." 

He chews the end of his pen absent-mindedly. Her eyes narrow as she notes it's one from the brand new batch she bought at the store. Her inner accountant considers the practicalities of forcing him to use twigs and mud to scrawl with in future. The guilty party leans back in his chair, curling his lips in warm greeting, quite oblivious to his offence. She decides to let him off the hook for now.

"You're here early, Cordelia," he observes, glancing at the clock on the far wall.

"Couldn't sleep," she explains ruefully as she moves towards his desk, "Whatcha doin'?"

"Going over the prophecies of Aberjian again. Recent developments have rather cast them in a new light." His voice burbles with the barely contained delight that only the oldest of manuscripts and the most obscure of languages can inspire.

"Really?" breathes Cordelia, manoeuvring herself around the desk to peer over his shoulder. "You mean there are things about the little one?" She indicates upstairs with a roll of her eyes and an incline of her head.

"Possibly. But that's not all. There's something here about a demon seer." He draws out the words ponderously in the manner he uses when he is still unsure of his deductions.

Cordelia starts a little. "Me? There's stuff about little old me?" She hangs eagerly over Wesley's shoulder, digging her fingers into his collarbone for support as she balances her weight, "Where?"

Wesley picks up a magnifying glass from the desk and holds it over the parchment, indicating a paragraph with his long dextrous finger, "Here. It mentions one with the gift of sight and an exchange…" He pauses a moment before capturing the clause he's looking for with a triumphant tap of his digit, "…an exchange of humanity for demon blood. See? And then once again… here," he shifts to another part of the document and begins to read, "The Demon Seer shall be touched by darkness and go willingly into the night."

"Yikes," Cordelia shivers. "Not sure if I like the sound of that."

"We don't know that it refers to you, Cordelia. I just thought it was worthy of note…" he voices trails off as he appears to catch sight of something out of the corner of his eye. Slowly, his gaze shifts upwards. She registers a sudden gloom casting itself over the scroll. Her head follows the path of Wesley's to discern its source.

Her sightline meets a large dark shape. Its skin is the texture of beaten leather, its hue that of polished jet. Her eyes continue their upward journey, taking in armoured panels and angular, deeply protruding clavicles. Up past a skull-decorated scapula, past neck tendons of supple steel, to a skull of defensive platelets and protective sharp-pointed spindles. From the midst of this swarthy personified citadel glow incongruously the watery red eyes of an albino. There is no mistaking the immense figure before them. Without a word, the towering demon reaches down to take the looking glass from the Englishman's hand. As he lifts the glass higher it seems to swell in size, its dimensions becoming greater in every direction - in diameter, in circumference, in the distorting thickness of the lens. Without fully comprehending the reasons prompting it, Cordelia recognises the familiar bitter taste of fear on her tongue. Her newly sweaty palms reach to grab a firmer hold of Wesley's sweater but they clasp only air. Wesley, the scroll, the desk, the office, the Hyperion are all vanished. She is barely conscious that there are no longer walls or ceiling. Nothing - except a bluish light, a checkerboard floor, Skip, and the now vast, corpulent looking glass, glinting and winking disconcertingly from its elevation above his head.

Instinctively, she senses his intention a second before it he transforms it into action. Her desperate protest leaves her mouth at the exact same moment as Skip deliberately loosens his leathery grip and the glass plummets to the ground with all the might of a meteor. Her scream mingles with the dissonant jangling tumult of a thousand splintering shards. Slivers of glass explode in all directions, flying upwards like an inverted hailstorm, and before Cordelia doubles over with dual shooting pains – one in the centre of her chest, and one in the corner of her eye – she catches sight of Skip smiling grimly through the raining shower of tiny transparent spears bouncing off his impervious chest. 

She kneels on the ground, head bowed to her knees. The pain is merely momentary and fleeting. When it subsides she finds herself shivering.

~*~*~*~

Cold. So cold.

She realises anew how much of her bare skin her flimsy California wardrobe exposes to the elements as invisible frosty particles brush against her hunched shoulders and her uncovered neck and chest. She hugs her arms tightly to her body and blinks her eyelids open. 

White. Nothing but white.

She is blind. She must be. The whiteness stretches in every direction relentlessly. She struggles to stand and is forced to remove a folded arm from her breast to use her hand as a lever against the ground. Her palm sinks into something crisp yet yielding and burningly cold. It's been a good few years since she felt anything similar but she recognises it at once. The white is fallen snow. 

Upright, she attempts to survey her surroundings, a tight sensation of uncertainty closing vice-like around her chest. Where the hell is she? Aspen certainly never looked like this. She attempts to gasp in oxygen but her lungs constrict against the frozen air. Breathless, eyes scorching from the unremitting glare refracting off the endless white blanket, she doesn't register the whirling blizzard gathering in the distance at first.

It grows closer, gathering speed and volume; hurling millions of delicate snowflakes around in a vicious vortex. Cordelia knows this is the point at which she should run – but there is nowhere to go – so she remains and watches the snowstorm's increasingly rapid approach with a morbid fascination.

As it nears it begins to retract in width, compressing ever more densely around its axis and whipping round faster and faster – reminding Cordelia of her game of spinning on the revolving chair in the office when nobody else is around, pulling her knees to her chin to increase the pace of the rotations. The swirling ice eddy is ten feet from her when, staring into its centre, she believes she imagines the flakes cohere briefly into an actual form. At seven feet the form flickers again and this time does not disperse but becomes more solid. At five feet there can be no more doubt – the form is human-esque, delicate, petite, wearing a long coat of ermine furs, and more than a little familiar. At ten inches the blizzard has metamorphosed completely, the figure's alabaster skin as pale and perfect as the snowflakes from which it sprang.

The apparition's dark lashes are adorned with tiny droplets of ice, giving the illusion of tears ever on the verge of falling. Her eyes glitter glassy tones of blue, the sky reflected in frozen pools. Strands of pale, colourless hair escape from under her ermine crown. Only her mouth betrays something other than a graceful, transparent ice-sculpture. Full and deep violent scarlet, the lips stretch into a smile to reveal a row of gleaming white small predatory teeth. The figure extends her cool, tiny hand. The part of Cordelia's mind that still has some remaining ties to common sense screams 'no'. The rest of Cordelia just wants to go home. The snow queen inclines her head quizzically and renews her request with a second tantalising curve of the dark blush lips. 

Cordelia finds herself slipping her own shivering tanned hand into the steady outstretched porcelain fingers before she is even aware that she has done so.

Time stills. They remain immobile - hand-in-hand, gazes locked - yet without witnessing the spectacle, Cordelia is aware of their surroundings buckling and transmuting around them. Columns of sparkling ice shoot from the ground. The soft mutable snow beneath their feet transforms, a rapid inch at a time, into a sheet of hard, crackled frozen water. It is a full minute, or perhaps a lifetime, before the ice maiden releases her hold and Cordelia can pull her attention away from the compelling hailstone eyes. 

She is standing in the middle of a magnificent palace of ice. The arches soar so high above her the point at which they intersect is just a pinprick. The immense empty space the frozen architecture creates fills her with an awe she associates with visits to medieval European cathedrals. Yet she knows in the marrow of her bones there is nothing holy within the walls of this great palazzo. 

The embodiment of that sentiment divests herself of her fur coverings. Her hair tumbles to her shoulders, brushing her cheeks, framing the beautifully drawn pastel lines of her face. Beneath the coat a spangle of delicate swan lace skims barely across her bird-like frame. Her pallor is even paler than the threads of her attire and yet her entire being gleams like burnished ebony. The dark queen of doomed damnation, looking unlike Cordelia ever saw her in life. She carries no trace of the desperate damsel, wearied by human disease or unwanted supernatural burden. Her vermilion lips are the hue of pulsing life, the depth of their tone contrasts strikingly against the ivory of her teeth as the luxurious smile seeps across her countenance once more. She pushes shining strands of silken blonde hair out of the enticing, glimmering blue of her eyes, orbs which telegraph their hypnotic power to betray nothing and everyone all at once, and then waits, feline, every muscle beneath the sheet of bloodless skin tensed with unnatural energy.

Cordelia regards her with awe of all kinds. A fluttering moth drawn to a cold dead flame. In other places, at other times, she would not be affected in this way but in these halls the power balance is beyond her ability to tip. 

Cordelia tries to speak but her companion's patience is obviously short. She closes in, catching all of Cordelia's attention in the invisible web woven somewhere between the frosted eyes and the wild-rose velvet lips. Inside her chest, Cordelia can feel her heart beating against her ribs like the wings of a caged humming bird. The sly look that shoots out from under the crystal-teared lashes informs Cordelia that she's not the only one aware of its semi-quaver vibrations. She's been here before. They both have. Terror shoots steel rods through her limbs, trapping her inside her body Iscariot. The few muscles that still seem to be able to operate are busy desperately trying to snatch air inside her lungs. The Other is now mere inches from her face. Her brittle harebell gaze locks intently with Cordelia's own amber and emerald one, diverting briefly to observe the little emissions of damp vapour that escape with each distressed flutter of its subject's mouth and nostrils with an air of amused novelty. Its owner's own chest is as still and unyielding as the columns of dense ice.

"Please…" 

The desperate utterance stumbles from Cordelia's lips, cracked and bruised. The rest of the sentence freezes in her throat before it can follow its trailblazer. It turns out to be unnecessary anyway; the Other suffixes a wordless conclusion, one that seems to please the crimson mouth enough to twitch it into a wider smile. The smile is not triumphant or mocking or seductive. The sentiment it conveys paralyses Cordelia's nerve endings more effectively than any of those. It is a welcome mat rolled out on the threshold of the white death world of the snow queen and her kind. 

Cordelia shivers, not from cold now, but from something she shies to name, and couldn't even if she wanted to as the slashed garnet lips descend upon her own.

The kiss is lighter than a cool mountain breeze at first. 

Cordelia does not respond.

Does not resist. 

And that absence of action is enough. She is aware of the echo of door slamming shut deep in a recess of her mind. There is only one way left to travel now. In her breast and behind her eye the embedded glass shards flare with pain once more. She winces, breathless, against the agony. Her tortured nerves shoot the whispered answer to her brain. 

She knows she can make it stop. Release her self from the burden, from the pain. She is tired. So tired. And one simple action separates her from resuscitation.

Surrender.

Without second thought, Cordelia unshackles the dark shadow her soul has tried so hard to crush and chain. It rises quickly and with such force, her muscles and bones feel brittle and ready to burst under its tidal wave surge. Her own lips part, answer, and then force the pace.

An elongated canine sears through thin skin providing the Other's mouth with a new sheen of red. When the violent contact breaks there is finally triumph on the pale visage _now_ – along with deep ridges and tiny fiery suns where the hailstones used to be. Cordelia is no longer aware of her fine garment's inadequacy against the frost, instead she feels decidedly feverish. 

The flame-filled gaze fixes upon her neck. The inevitable dual incisions which swiftly follow pinch and leave her gasping; their points of entry, familiar; the pain, visceral and intense. The humming bird in Cordelia's ribcage turns a figure of eight. Every muscle - from brow to instep - spasms hard. The bloody lips apply greater pressure, trapping the raised carotid artery with a merciless suction.

Her initial scream never manages to crawl from her throat. In its lieu she begins to count each excruciating moment to ten. 

She gets to eight.

The agony instantaneously subsides. Floats away downstream with her vessel's ebbing contents to be replaced by a wave of something warm, plush and electric.

Frozen no longer, Cordelia melts.

She feels lighter, free of weighty gravity. She is conscious of every fibre of her body. Every cell. Every nerve ending. They gleam and glisten in the darkness that has swum up to surround her. Satin and sandpaper. Raw and ancient. Connected, not to each other, but to the very fabric of time. She is sewn and woven in a dark primal tapestry. Her sinuous silks undulate over and under similar threads belonging to the snowy siren, and to others she recognises - each as vibrant and majestic and terrible as the next.

She seeps through the earth's molten core yet the sensation is like touching the underside of heaven. She is burning, draining, flying. Trying to spin her flaxen self out into infinity, but the attempt is too great, the distance too far, the loss of blood too swift. She returns to her fragile confining shell of a body in time to acknowledge extinction. She swoons, in the manner of all good victims in torrid Romances at the close of their chapter. Over the noise of her last few weak irregular heartbeats she hears her own blood singing to her from inside the wide flushed veins of her sister demon, her insipid nemesis. Her fading consciousness is only aware of one thing, the deep desperate longing to join them, the deep plum fluid and the spun glass body, in the eternal ice fire and dark light dance.

Cordelia springs bolt upright from the pillows, chest heaving, lungs gasping. A fine mist of sweat coats her cheeks, upper arms and stomach - cold and clammy. One hand clasps the right side of her neck. Breath heavy and forced, she lowers her palm to study it in the dim light, fully expecting a garish stain of black blood to decorate its centre. There is nothing. Only a further sheen of sticky perspiration.

A nightmare, she tells herself, just a nightmare. The sentiment is comforting, however dishonest.

~*~*~*~

The air in her bedroom is humid. Sizzling with a static electricity, which - she intuits inarticulately – emanates from her own pores. Nevertheless, she pushes the residual vibrations of the dream from her mind with determination, resettles herself in her sheets and attempts to force herself into unconsciousness with sheer willpower. 

She is adept at recognising the danger signs by now. 

She has taught herself to possess a semi-awareness of the curtain as it begins to fall, the curtain that drapes between the worlds of Wake and of Dream. It is this no-man's land between the two states from which the cocoa and fairytales are supposed to protect her. For it is through this chink in states of perception, the doorway between her conscious and subconscious psyche that she is convinced they come. The Strangest Things. Unreal creatures whose reality she has tasted, has touched, has felt pierce her being. They can come to her no more in the waking world and so she is free, free to give rein to their wanders through the dark chambers within, chambers she barely registers by day; the hidden decadent desires that frighten because they fascinate, repulse as they seduce. They are not part of who she is… was. 

She chose to allow her identity to be fractured: They seeped through the cracks.

She dreamt of The Strangest Things only once before her change – a dream vision that, once its usefulness had been served, she pushed from her mind. Now they come to her nightly. And she knows internally, wordlessly, that the milk and chocolate ward is merely the pretence of Wakeful fear. Fear - not of them - but of herself. They come, not to terrorise her, but because she calls for them. Cries soundlessly from uncharted depths within a plaintive dark siren song. Yearns. Then waits… for The Strangest Things to answer as they have risen throughout time from ancient primeval powers to do.

She sipped their awesome allure, terrible and timeless. She never wanted to put her lips to that glass, but now it has been whipped from her reach for good she finds herself, unexpectedly and against all logic and reason, savouring that tainted tincture. In the bright glare of day she would never admit to such sickened longings. Not to her sunny shopping, filing, Momma Bear self. Never to the others. Not even to him. Especially not to him. She is supposed to bear the promise of bright salvation, not wish to lose herself in the forbidden forests, forests in which he has traced all the tracks.

She is becoming familiar with some of those dank, dripping pathways too. Every night follows the same pattern now. First, She. The one who first turned the key in the lock of those chamber doors in one of her many guises. She is Salome, Morgan Le Fay, Milady, La Belle Dame – or as tonight, Andersen's Snow Queen. Wrapping her evil in elegance, tempting her to taste. Cordelia is always petrified, often seduced, and invariably surrenders. 

His visits play out a little differently.

"Please…"

The desperate utterance stumbles from Cordelia's lips, cracked and bruised. He glances up from scoring trails across her thighs, leaving tiny ruby beads behind his ragged nails. The demon shimmers beneath the bone of his brow. She twists beneath his immense weight. Her heart bruises her chest from the inside. She only knows she must be inhaling because she is still alive. Her trachea feels as useless and leaden as piping. Unlike his sire he never smiles. The masks of both the human and the creature remain implacable. She is not even sure who he truly is on these night visits. Doesn't care. In these deliriums it's not the soul that concerns her.

He moves up her body with supple dexterity. Cordelia tenses in anticipation. He hesitates, distracting himself with new scratched sketches. He scores her in sealing wax red. Marks every inch. She senses only sparkling golden arabesques dancing across her skin. Her Midas. Gilded and greedy. He whispers his dark secrets to her with his hands. There are never words. The Strangest Things true power doesn't lie in their syntax.

He is biding his time and she is losing her patience. She makes her request clearer.

"Please…" she begs again, and latches her fingers into his hair, guiding him towards her ultimate object. The desperation is never fear with him but, much worse, only want.

He has yet to disappoint.

Her back arches in reflex as her flesh rips, but still she grips hard, pressing his head to her neck. She can taste velvet and iron on her own tongue. Her body is on its tenth tip to toe shudder before it dawns that the taste that coats her epiglottis isn't adrenaline but her own haemoglobin and plasma. By the eleventh serpentine tensing of her muscles she too dazed to form coherent thoughts. She only feels. She exists. Dissolving into the ether as easily and naturally as she must have materialised out of it. She is honey, the gold of his eyes. She flows, she glides, and she knows the ten darkest kinds of bliss as she pours down his throat and becomes him. Them. Ancient and omnipotent.

~*~*~*~

It's another unseasonably warm day in the City of Angels but today, with no Plymouth at her disposal, it's the bus or nothing. Cordelia disembarks at the stop nearest to the hotel, positions her sunglasses firmly on her nose against the relentlessly cheery daylight and walks the two blocks to the Hyperion slowly. She picks up bagels for the gang on the way and eats hers as strolls. Her hair swings and bounces at little as she walks – the new shampoo obviously suits it. She has stopped anticipating there to be more than there is when she goes to tie it back or brush it out. For weeks after she first cut off her long cheerleader locks, the shortness when she ran her fingers through it surprised her Her mind not yet accustomed to the loss of length, expecting it still to extend past her shoulders as it had for years. 'Ghost hair', she had labelled the phenomena, until Dennis had thrown a cushion at her in indignation at the perceived belittling of his state of existence. 

Across the road, the boarded up windows of an old warehouse, have been newly decorated in the night with another layer of artless graffiti. The still wet drips of red paint course, shining, down the buildings blind eyes. 

Thick vital velvet drops roll lethargically over the contours of a young thigh.

Cordelia squeezes her eyes. Dispels the vision. Marches resolutely on through the bright, scolding sunlight.

The heavy art-deco door gives reluctantly to the pressure of her hand, groaning in its familiar, comforting fashion. The lobby is blessedly cool and gloomy after the glare of the L.A streets. She crosses the lobby and circumnavigates the desk to dump the bagels by the coffee machine, calling, "Another day to die for in the City of Angels, Wes! Should get some sun on that pasty English ass!"

She stops short, a little taken aback, as the figure which appears in the office doorway to answer her belongs not to Wesley, but to Fred. 

"He's getting some," Fred informs her. "Well, not specifically on his pasty ass, but he's gone to the Juju store for some more research materials," she blusters.

"Right." Briefly thrown by the break in her routine, Cordelia regains her composure to enquire smoothly, "Any progress with the translating?" Then, more hesitantly, "Nothing, for instance, about demon seers?"

"Not that he told me," Fred answers, a little baffled.

"Good. That's good." Cordelia's relief is a little too tangible. Her acting is usually better than this. If only she weren't so tired.

"Bagels." She points out the bag.

Predictably, Fred's face lights up. "Oh, goody."

Cordelia hears the bag being plundered enthusiastically as she turns away. 

"Any of those for me?"

The voice is good humoured and warm but it sends cold steel down her spine. Breaking the bonds, she paints on a smile and raises her head in the direction of the speaker. He ambles down the stairs, infant in his arms.

"Sure. And I brought a bottle of whiskey for Connor," she returns smartly.

Eyes. Those eyes. Turned on _her_. Warm. Filled with faith and love. If he knew. If he ever imagined…

She feels sick.

He smiles at the joke; basking in her wit, her presence, like a cat in the sun. His unquestioning belief in her radiates from his affectionate gaze and falls like a blanket over her head. Unworthy, she fights for air.

Still, she manages to smile and stroll as she excuses herself and breaks for the bathroom.

~*~*~*~*~

Her forehead presses against the mirror. Her hands grip the basin so hard, white bone shows through her knuckles. The bowl fills. She shifts her position and lowers her head to the water, scooping it up with her hands. It feels fresh against her tight skin. Cleansing her, washing away her sins.

"Forgive me, Father…" she mutters. But her father left her and there's not enough water in the world.

Thoughts tumble through her head; a shifting montage of strangeness. Missing Doyle, loving Xander, tears shed for unborn children, coconut and papaya shampoo, Skip, shards of glass, slicing teeth, beautiful hopeless deadly Darla, scenting blood, wanting Angel, desiring something darker.

Cordelia lifts her head slowly and gazes into the now steamed glass of the mirror. She rubs a little circle in the condensation. 

From the misty frame the Strangest Thing of all stares back at her.

Together, they close their eyes and see snow.

Fin.

* * *

Author's note:  
The tale Cordelia reads before bedtime is Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen". You can find it at   
Feedback to chrystler_wolf@yahoo.co.uk


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